Obesity remains a serious health problem and it is no secret that many people want to lose weight. Behavioral economists typically argue that “nudges” help individuals with various decisionmaking flaws to live longer, healthier, and better lives. In an article in the new issue of Regulation, Michael L. Marlow discusses how nudging by government differs from nudging by markets, and explains why market nudging is the more promising avenue for helping citizens to lose weight.

Armed with a computer model in 1935, one could probably have written the exact same story on California drought as appears today in the Washington Post some 80 years ago, prompted by the very similar outlier temperatures of 1934 and 2014.

Two long wars, chronic deficits, the financial crisis, the costly drug war, the growth of executive power under Presidents Bush and Obama, and the revelations about NSA abuses, have given rise to a growing libertarian movement in our country – with a greater focus on individual liberty and less government power. David Boaz’s newly released The Libertarian Mind is a comprehensive guide to the history, philosophy, and growth of the libertarian movement, with incisive analyses of today’s most pressing issues and policies.

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Government Cost-Cutting Leads to Cost Overruns

The government can’t seem to do anything right! It can’t even streamline activities to cut costs without creating egregious cost overruns.

Since the late 1980s, the military has gone through a number of BRAC rounds to close excess military facilities. The BRAC process has shown that Congress can pursue spending cuts if only politicians put the effort in to make it happen.

In its latest review of the 2005 BRAC program—the largest and most complex—the GAO found that the estimated cost of $21 billion to implement the program had grown to $35 billion by Sept. 30, 2011.

… Take the consolidation of various National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) locations at a new campus at Fort Belvoir, Va. A project that had been projected to cost $1.1 billion grew to a price tag of $2.6 billion.

… Even small BRAC projects experienced giant cost growth. …At Fort Jackson, S.C., for example, the price tag for two projects grew by more than 1,000 percent. One of them, the Single Drill Sergeant School, was supposed to cost $1.8 million. But when the Army determined that its 40-year-old facilities needed new classrooms, headquarters offices and a dining area for 250 additional students, the project’s cost grew to $27.2 million, the GAO reports.

I’ve described some of the causes of cost overruns in this essay. One of the fundamental factors that drives all kinds of federal government inefficiency is that costs are benefits to public-sector decisionmakers.

For program administrators, it always seems as though the need for services is growing, and program expansion also brings greater personal prestige.

For politicians, there is little if any downside if federal projects in their districts double or triple in cost. Indeed, cost overruns are usually a benefit to them because that means more voters in their districts will receive money from taxpayers who live elsewhere in the nation.

While decisionmakers in private markets are disciplined by the need to earn profits, there is no such mechanism in the public sector to control costs. Occasional negative stories by good reporters like Pincus may embarrass the big spenders in government, but it rarely seems to change their spendthrift ways.